No doubt about it, animal actors--the cats, rats, and monkeys who perform for us in the movies--are fascinating. There is no situation, no fate, more absurd than theirs: the famous dog, the million-dollar bear, or the chimpanzee with fan mail. Indeed, this area of the entertainment world abounds with absurdity, and the infinite combinations of the various forms of dementia (the donkey taught to swordfight in Kevin Costner's The Postman, or the beloved dog Slammer, sitting quietly in a dog casket for There's Something About Mary) never fail to amuse and appall at the same time. What's more, their fame is fascinating (Lassie made more money than most actors in the '40s), especially when augmented by the ridiculous behind-the-scenes stories, such as the huge number of takes, back-up dogs, and bits of juicy steak needed to create the illusion of little Benji scuba-diving. The mere existence of animal actors emphasizes the lunacy, the total perversity that is Hollywood.

Ah, but we love perversity. Perversity is why Hollywood thrives, why Titanic--an overlong and over-budget love story based on a tragic accident--made nearly $2 billion worldwide. Hollywood knows that the more ridiculous, the more perverse, and the more wasteful they are, the more intrigued and addicted we will become to their elaborate fantasies. (I believe it was a famous Islamic thinker who said that a great civilization is marked not by its architecture and cities, but by how much it wastes; and another thinker--Greek this time--said that great beauty is only possible through great waste.) Hollywood's essential perversity--its willingness to waste large amounts of money, and to show off this colossal waste to the public--is best captured in the matter of the animal actor.

A case in point is Touchstone's recent movie Six Days, Seven Nights, starring Harrison Ford and Anne Heche. The plot has them on an island paradise called Makatea (which, oddly enough, means "how are you" in Shona, the indigenous language of Zimbabwe). According to an animal trainer in L.A., in order to add a little danger to this "romantic adventure," it was decided that Ford and Heche should have a run-in with wild boars. To make this illusion possible, three animal trainers in California were hired to turn five farm pigs into furious killer boars that attacked people. For six months, at $200 per pig per day, these harmless creatures were taught to do all manner of boarish things, like insolently running between people's legs while looking wild, menacing, and tropic-crazed. Touchstone then flew these pig actors to Hawaii, where the film was shot, and put them up at a local farm, while their trainers (now numbering four) were put up in a five-star hotel and paid $400 a day (plus a $120 per diem and $60 an hour overtime). For the next three months, the pigs adjusted to the tropical climate and continued their rigorous training.

I do not know exactly how extensive a role these pigs were to play in the movie, and if initially the director had intended them to be a recurring danger to the couple--pursuing them across the island, attacking them at unexpected times--but in the final cut, only one pig appears, and only for a few pitiful seconds! What's more, it's a miserable little scene: the pig (which is dyed black) jumps out of the bushes and attacks Anne Heche (who jumps into a lake, screaming), then attacks Harrison Ford (who scuffles with the innocuous beast before joining Heche in the lake). The cost of this scene ran over $200,000--but what is that, really, in a $78 million film? Nothing. Nothing at all! In fact, these pigs were lucky by Hollywood standards--they actually made the final cut.

When an animal actor has a prominent movie role, what we admire is not so much their acting (which amounts to nothing more than tricks), but the days, the hours, the skill of the trainers, and the vast amount of money going into making this unknowing creature do seemingly amazing things. (On the flip side, one recent article argued that animal actors are very aware that they are film stars, and trainers often tell directors not to use words like "ready, action, go" unless they really mean it, as the animal actors know exactly what these words mean.)

The Edge, coincidentally another film about rich city folks who crash into some wild place, is another example of this type of absurdity. Here the actor is Bart the bear, star of such films as Clan of the Cave Bear, The Bear, and Bear Mountain. Weighing in at 1,400 pounds, and commanding a surreal $20,000-a-day salary (bears are the most expensive animals to hire, with the average bear earning about $7,500/day, followed by chimps, in the $750-to-$1,000 range, then tigers at $700/day), Bart spends a good part of The Edge convincingly attacking Alec Baldwin and Sir Anthony Hopkins, and even eats Harold Perrineau. What makes Bart intriguing is the immense amount of work and money--$600,000, to be precise--needed to produce the illusion of a killer bear. This kind of extravagant display of wealth and waste makes Hollywood, and by extension Los Angeles, what it is: the greatest civilization on earth.

The trainers of these animals try to justify, even obscure, the ridiculousness of animal actors by meaningfully donating some of their earnings to projects which help protect animals in the real world. For example, Bart's work in Hollywood has saved thousands of wild bears through the Vital Ground Fund; and Jiggs the chimpanzee, who starred in more than 15 Tarzan movies (he recently died at the age of 64, and is said to have spent his last years as something of a "simian Grandpa Moses," painting hundreds of abstract pictures), sponsored a fund that helped support his less-fortunate brethren in the jungle. But these gestures amount to nothing: if the animal actor's work in Hollywood represented real change or real improvements to our vanishing environment, then Hollywood would not be interested in them at all. Kindness, generosity, compassion? These are not perverse qualities, and what we want--what we long for--is hardcore perversity.